he girl, I'll bet."

The sheriff, who was a tall, lanky man with a high, hooked nose and a
pointed chin that looked like a large knuckle, had a habit of thrusting
forward his upper lip to emphasize his words. He thrust it forward now,
making his bristly, close-cropped red moustache stand out from his face
like the quills of a porcupine.

"I'd thought of that--all that," he continued. "Looks like a simple case
to me--very."

"It may be," said Hastings, sure now that Crown would not suggest their
working together.

"Also," the sheriff told him, "I'll take this."

He held out the crude weapon with which, apparently, the murder had been
committed. It was a dagger consisting of a sharpened nail file, about
three inches long, driven into a roughly rounded piece of wood. This
wooden handle was a little more than four inches in length and two
inches thick. Hastings, giving it careful examination, commented:

"He shaped that handle with a pocket-knife. Then, he drove the butt-end
of the nail file into it. Next, he sharpened the end of the file--put a
razor edge on it.--Where did you get this, Mr. Crown?"

"A servant, one of the coloured women, picked it up as I came in. You
were still in the library."

"Where was it?"

"About fifteen or twenty feet from the body. She stumbled on it, in the
grass. Ugly thing, sure!"

"Yes," Hastings said, preoccupied, and added: "Let me have it again."

He took off his spectacles and, screwing into his right eye a jeweller's
glass, studied it for several minutes. If he made an important
discovery, he did not communicate it to Crown.

"It made an ugly hole," was all he said.

"You see the blood on it?" Crown prompted.

"Oh, yes; lucky the rain stopped when it did."

"When did it stop--out here?" Crown inquired.

"About eleven; a few minutes after I'd gone up to bed."

"So she was killed between eleven and midnight?"

"No doubt about that. Her hat had fallen from her head and was bottom up
beside her. The inside of the crown and all the lower brim was dry as a
bone, while the outside, even where it did not touch the wet grass, was
wet. That showed there wasn't any rain after she was struck down."

The sheriff was impressed by the other's keenness of observation.

"That's so," he said. "I hadn't noticed it."

He sought the detective's opinion.

"Mr. Hastings, you've just heard the stories of everybody here. Do me a
favour, will you? Is it worth while for me to go into Wash